Orwell, Hitchens, and Chomsky walk into a bar...

You call Hitchens "the closest the left has to its own Hunter S. Thompson" - HST isn't left?

Otherwise, excellent article.

"Orwell, Hitchens, and Chomsky" walk into a bar" is a great setup. Can anyone finish the joke? (I would but I'm too tired)

Saddam is the bartender... that's as far as I got.

ouch

No, I don't believe HST was left. But then again, he wasn't exactly right either. Although he befriended them for a year or too, he didn't exactly condone the senseless Vietnam-protester bashing Nazi thugs of the Hell's Angels, but he wasn't exactly hip to Leary and Ginsberg's counter-culture movement either ("that was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip")

He was just too wrecked the whole time to even figure out what the hell he wanted. He was a bit racist too

But he did utterly loathe Nixon, and to a lesser extent Reagan and Bush (Sr). And he backed (fairly leftish democrat) George McGovern in 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail'. And didn't he run for mayor of Aspen on some loose kind of anarchist/far left platform?

I thought he ran on a manically far RIGHT libertarian type fun w/guns platform!

Well, I did say "loose".

socialist libertarian = anarchist

dave marsh is pro-gun: so were the black panthers => it's not by itself a right-left issue

Just last week I listened to an interview with HST :


Mick O?Regan: So at the moment people don?t want to hear that sort of criticism, they want people to rally round the flag and support the military?


Hunter S. Thompson: I think that?s right, and I think the reason for that is that they don?t want to hear it because boy, that?s going to be a lot of agonising reappraisal, as they say. What reality is in this country and the world right now. Yes, popular opinion in this country has to be swung over to ?the White House is wrong, these people are corporate thieves. They?ve turned the American Dream into a chamber of looting.? It would take a lot of adjustment, mentally.

It's only right that the sentence with the least amount of thought put into it should generate the most amount of discussion. I was at least happy to get the phrase "celebrity Rosa Luxemburgist" in there.

The original headline for my piece was: I Wish My Brother George Were Here. I'm curious what you Lovers of Everything think of our modern Orwellians. Are some more equal than others? I also notice that Orwell has been invoked by editorialists on the question of Big Brotherly security laws...

Here's the latest from Chomsky and Hitchens, to give you a sense of how far Orwell can be taken in different directions.

http://www.counterpunch.com/chomsky1118.html
http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2074129

pete, I enjoyed the article...articulate and it conveys a "knowledge" on your part.

as for the HST line, I didn't know what to make of it at first, but reading the discussion here, it becomes much more clear. Is Thompson left, right, what? The answer is rather, yes. He's one of those odd swing characters whose ideology (as such) doesn't fit well with either side, but is often assigned to one side of the aisle or the other.

Same goes for Hitchens. Recall that his column in the Nation was "minority report"--he was at odds with the "left"...yet when he appears on cspan, he represents the "left" to Andrew Sullivan's "right".

I imagine HST fits pretty well into a libertarian mold, but I'm not so up on him as to say so definitively.

And, I cracked up just reading the title to the thread...

We've had plenty of fun with Chomsky here before if you trawl the search function. Hitchens is a joke lately as far as I'm concerned (and not just walking into a bar) and Amis' prattish attack on him might be giving him plenty of undeserved cred.

Cockburn is the only gadfly who's fun anymore.

I take it, then, that you don't find my article worth reading? Fair enough.

No no I read yr. article. I was just throwing some other stuff around. I had a hard time with it because by the end I felt very unfamiliar with yr. points and the fashion in which you were making them. Orwell didn't go "Trotskyist" in WWII at all but rather moved towards his eventual reconciliation with the UK. He also always had an odd inverse white-man's-burden thing towards empire, really feeling that more than anything else it wasn't worth the hassle. His end, by the standards of even a good liberal was ignomious with his turning in names to British intelligence and all.

& I think shoehorning chomsky into a descendant of Orwell doesn't work at all precisely because chomsky DOES trust language so much.

The first part was quite nice, however.

Thanks, man. But I would hope the more unfamiliar points, made in an unfamiliar way, would be the ones that would get you off.

I never said Orwell went "Trotskyist" but that he embraced a "Trotskyist" slogan in favor of the war on fascism (he was by 1941 careful to put the T word in quotes, because every socialist who was against Stalin was carelessly labeled that way).

As he wrote in 1941: "We cannot establish anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century."

The first half of that point is arguable; the second half turned out to be wrong: The class system survived victory over Hitler just fine. But either way, it's hardly the thinking of someone moving toward "reconciliation with the UK," or a guy who thinks imperialism is a drag. He was a moralist about Empire to the end.

I'm also curious where you think Chomsky and Orwell would differ on the uses and abuses of English. The real difference between them, it seems to me, is the one I tried to point out in my piece (apparently not very compellingly): namely, the split over whether, under some circumstances, the Left should make an ally of the Empire.

I think this is the issue of the day, otherwise I wouldn't have brought Chomsky up, though he's a lifelong admirer of Orwell...

Anyway, hope you don't mind me arguing with you. That's pretty much what I was hoping for when I posted this...

About that list of names Orwell turned in, Hitchens notes that the IRD didn't do domestic surveillance and that Orwell simply didn't want more Stalinists hurting the democratic Left from positions of power--a weak defense, I know, but worth reading...